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Since the interaction with immersive visualizations can be crucial to finding the desired information, this work seeks to explore the possibilities of improving this kind of interaction by providing tangible touch points in the form of drones. Not only is the tracking of the drones a vital aspect but also the finding of meaningful behavior that is applied to the drone after it has been touched and manipulated, is at the core of this work. After a prototype model has been found for interaction and drone response it will be tested and evaluated on various immersive visualizations by conducting a user study that is centered around the ease and amount of gaining of information.

Tasks:

• Literature research concerning tangible interaction with virtual reality visualizations especially focused on drone-interaction.
• Setting up and tracking a drone to act as a tangible point.
• Conducting of an evaluative user study integrating various visualizations.

Requirements:

• Basics in Unity 3D (C#) and 3D modeling.
• Interest in tangible VR-interaction.
• Plus: experience with three dimensional interaction concepts.

Details

Effizienz ist ein wichtiger Faktor der Usabilityforschung. Im Allgemeinen beschreibt die Effizienz eines Systems den Aufwand, welchen ein Nutzer erbringen muss, um eine bestimmte Aufgabe zu erfüllen. Effizienz wird meist in Zeit gemessen und evaluiert.

Die wissensbasierte Authentifizierung (bspw. PIN) stellt ein Beispiel für eine solche Aufgabe dar. Als Maß der Effizienz dient hier in der Regel die Zeit, welche für die korrekte Eingabe eines Passwortes/PIN benötigt wird. Neue Erkenntnisse deuten jedoch darauf hin, dass es neben der aktiven Eingabe weitere Phasen gibt, welche sowohl die gemessene als auch die gefühlte Effizienz des Mechanismus beeinflussen. Dabei ist neben der reinen Existenz dieser Phasen auch das Verhältnis der Phasen zueinander maßgebend für die User Experience.

In diesem Einzelpraktikum soll der Einfluss der verschiedenen Authentifizierungsphasen auf die Effizienz untersucht werden. Dafür sollen mehrere Modifikationen eines PIN-Eingabesystems entwickelt und im Feldtest studiert werden.

Aufgaben:

1. Literaturrecherche / selbstständiges Aneignen von Fachwissen
2. Ausarbeitung der zu testenden Konzepte (im Team)
3. Entwicklung der Studiensoftware (Android oder iOS)
4. Planung und Durchführung der Nutzerstudie (im Team)
5. Analyse und Aufbereitung der Studienergebnisse

Bei Erfolg des Projektes besteht die Möglichkeit an einer internationalen Publikation mitzuwirken.

Details

Gaze-based head gestures are a hands-free interaction technique using the occulo-vestibular reflex. A bachelor thesis showed already that this interaction technique works for checking checkboxes and answering dialogs.
This thesis should research whether advanced interaction, such as drag & drop operations, using scrollbars and manipulation of 3D objects, is possible with gaze-based head gestures.

Tasks

• Get familiar with hardware and software
• Find and study related literature
• Develop software supporting the interaction method
• Design a user study
• Conduct a user study
• Do a statistical evaluation
• Write all down in a thesis

Details

Smooth pursuits do not only work without a calibration of the eye tracker but also allow to calibrate the eye tracker.The aim of this thesis is the design of pursuit target movements which are not perceived as a task but followed by the spectator. This will allow to do an unconscious calibration.

Tasks

• Get familiar with hardware and software
• Find and study related literature
• Find appropriate target movements
• Develop software detecting smooth pursuit gaze movements
• Design a user study
• Conduct a user study
• Do a statistical evaluation
• Write all down in a thesis

Details

The eye does smooth pursuit movements when following moving objects and such movements can be used for gaze-based interfaces. Typically the pursuit targets are generated by software. In contrast this thesis should research the detectibility of pursuit targets in a video.

Tasks

• Get familiar with hardware and software
• Find and study related literature
• Find or create royalty free videos with moving targets
• Develop software extracting target coordinates from the video and detect pursuit movements with the gaze coordinates given by the eye tracker
• Design a user study
• Conduct a user study
• Do a statistical evaluation
• Write all down in a thesis

Details

The benefits of hexagons have been widely used in information visualization. They can be used not only for dividing spatial areas into clear even grids but also for representing given polygons such as geographic administration units in order to eliminate differences in size and shape that could distort the impression of a visualization. In the latter use case the arrangement of hexagons is often modeled by hand. This work seeks to find an efficient algorithmic method that creates an optimal hexagonal grid out of any set of polygons while respecting original neighborhood, location and shape of the polygonal outline as much as possible, while evaluating if this can be done fully automatic or at what degree manual correction can be necessary. In conclusion the algorithm shall be tested by creating a 3d-visualization of a spatial polygon grid that is usable for immersive visualization.

Tasks:

• Literature research including space-filling visualization techniques.
• Modeling of the algorithm by extending and evaluating previous work on the topic.
• Implementation and testing of the algorithm in comparison to existing grids.

Requirements:

• Interest in 2D geometry and space-filling algorithms.
• Experience in web-programming.
• Ability to join on and extend previous work.

Details

Description

Virtual/Mixed Reality (VR) has been gaining popularity in the last years and we have seen that the future of these systems may have a very social factor to it. The most obvious social interaction may be in gaming, where multiple players can interact in the virtual world. However, collaboration and meetings in virtual reality may be another scenario that might even replace current tools such as videoconferencing.This project builds upon an ongoing one that looks into supporting interactions between a person in the virtual and the real world. The ongoing projects identifies designs and explores technical solutions for displaying real world user engagement in VR (i.e. someone enters the room, how can this be displayed to a person in VR?).

The goal of this project is to test methods for actively controlling user interactions. For example, once we have displayed in VR that a person has entered the room in the real world, how can the person in VR decide to engage with the person in the real world without taking the headset off.

Tasks

• Review of related work on privacy in virtual reality, gaze interaction and interaction in virtual reality and measuring HMD movements in VR
• Developing a prototype of a virtual reality environment that tests a number of designs for controlling user interactions (i.e. gaze, handheld controller)
• Implementing eye tracker data into VR
• Conducting an in-depth investigation of the potential and challenges of a virtual environment
• Analyze the data collected from the studies and build valid conclusions

Requirements

• Independent scientific work and creative problem solving
• Interest in performing user studies and experiments
• Interest in VR
• Good / Very good experience with c# 3D authoring tools (e.g.,Unity)

Details

While wearing a head mounted display in a collaborative task between a person acting in the real world and a person acting in the virtual world, the visual connection between the HMD user and the real world user is disrupted. But visual connection between two collaborators is important for at least five distinct communicative functions: regulating conversation flow, providing feedback, communicating emotional information, communicating the nature of interpersonal relationships and avoiding distraction by restricting visual input [1,2]. This work will focus on the aspect of providing feedback in a collaborative task. As real world studies show, the availability of eye gaze increase collaboration speed significantly. Also there is some work, that shows that this finding holds for virtual avatars [4], but there seams to be no added value by presenting a stereoscopic representation of the eyes [4]. Therefore the task for this work is to evaluate, if a display mounted on the front of a HMD will enhance the collaboration performance. Possible tasks to test this might be a selection task, at which the instructor wearing the HMD will speak out which object needs to be taken assisted by the eye gaze presented of the front of the HMD. Also it might be a possibility to directly measure the accuracy generated by the eye gaze as in [4]. The study will have a wizard of Oz design, as the eye movements will be precalculated. Therefore the technical implementation in this study will be to mount a display onto a HMD in a defined way and calibrate the displayed eye gaze on real world coordinates, based on the coordinates given by the head tracking system. The variables to be examined will be the kind of eye representation on the screen. 1. Real World Eyes, 2. Eyes on Display not moving/ head gaze to target, 3. Eyes on Display gazing at target/ no head movement 4. Eyes on Display gazing at target/ head movement.

[1]Argyle, M., Bodily Communication. Methuen & Co., London, 1975.
[2]Kendon, A. Some Functions of Gaze-Direction in Social Interaction. Acta Psychologica, 26 (1967), 22- 63.
[3]Sascha Fagel, Gérard Bailly, Frédéric Elisei, and Amélie Lelong. 2010. On the importance of eye gaze in a face-to-face collaborative task. In Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Affective interaction in natural environments (AFFINE '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 81-86. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1877826.1877847
[4]Norman Murray, Dave Roberts, Anthony Steed, Paul Sharkey, Paul Dickerson, and John Rae. 2007. An assessment of eye-gaze potential within immersive virtual environments. ACM Trans. Multimedia Comput. Commun. Appl. 3, 4, Article 8 (December 2007)

Aufgaben:

• Literaturrecherche verwandter Arbeiten
• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes
• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity 5, HMD, Android)
• Versuchsdesign, Durchführung und Auswertung einer Probandenstudie zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfrage

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik
• Interesse an selbstständigem wissenschaftlichem Arbeiten
• Erfahrung in Planung, Durchführung und statistischer Auswertung von Probandenstudien
• Grundlage in Unity (C#) und 3D-Modellierung

Details

If two people in one room (collocated) have to work together and one of them wears a head mounted display (HMD) like the Oculus Rift, they will experience the so called presence disparity. This border influences many aspect of collaboration like social awareness or deixis. One solution of overcoming breaks in the work flow of the participants is to augment the virtual world to let the virtual participant see his real world (RW) collaborator [1]. In our setup the RW and the HMD collaborator will meet at a multi touch tabletop display in order to collaborate. The Kinect (or similar RGB-D Sensor) will be above the Table in order to track the peoples movement. The VR user will see the hands of everybody reaching over the table, which might help to compensate the limitations in mutual awareness. Further the VR user will be able to see his own hands, when reaching over the table, what wil help him in the interaction with others. In this work you need to setup the tracking device (e.g. Kinect) above a touchtable. Further you need to integrate the point cloud rendering into Unity 5.x based on the tracking data of the tracking device, by the use of http://pointclouds.org/ or similar libraries. In the first user study you will have to assess the tracking accuracy of the system, when the virtual user is interacting with the touchsurface. Based on the results you will setup an experiment, that enables the users to collaborate in a puzzle task to asses the performance of the system compared to a real world baseline.
[1]Tang, A., Boyle, M. and Greenberg, S. (2005). Display and Presence Disparity in Mixed Presence Groupware. Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology, Vol. 37, No. 2, May, p71-88.)

Aufgaben:

• Literaturrecherche verwandter Arbeiten
• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes
• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity 5, HMD, Multi-Touch Tisch)
• Versuchsdesign, Durchführung und Auswertung einer Probandenstudie zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfrage

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik
• Intereße an selbstständigem wißenschaftlichem Arbeiten
• Erfahrung in Planung, Durchführung und statistischer Auswertung von Probandenstudien
• Grundlage in Unity (C#) und 3D-Modellierung

Details

In order to develop, test or present simulated car functionalities without having a real car prototype, one needs to have an environment to drive in. However creating these environments is based on experts software, but the people interested in exploring the car functions are no experts in using those tools. What these people enjoy to do is to explore the possibilities of a car function in different environments they choose for themselves. As shown by the ideas of the google chrome racer ([1],[2]) a fun an collaborative way of creating those environments is to connect several private devices together to generate a big collaborative environment. The task is to elaborate about a framework, that enables several users to generate a street network in a collaborative manner, which will be rendered in Unity 5.x. The layout is defined by the ordering of sketches they made on their smartphones and then connecting this sketch to a road network. Further the users need to be enabled to add other environmental elements by sketching them on their Smartphone and adding them to a certain coordinate of the generated street network. A user study should show the advantages and disadvantages of the system in terms of promoting collaboration, usability, complexity of the results and ease of use in comparison to a pen and paper creation process.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOCM9_qGccY
[2]https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/casestudies/racer/

Aufgaben:

• Literaturrecherche verwandter Arbeiten
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• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes
• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity 5, HMD, Multi-Touch Tisch)
• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes zum Wechsel der Position
• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity 5/ Unreal, HMD, Multi-Touch Tisch)
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• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes zum Wechsel der Position
• Versuchsaufbau (Unity 5, Android, Surface Touch etc.)
• Versuchsdesign, Durchführung und Auswertung einer Probandenstudie zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfrage

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik
• Interesse an selbstständigem wissenschaftlichem Arbeiten
• Erfahrung in Planung, Durchführung und statistischer Auswertung von Probandenstudien
• Grundlage in Unity (C#) und 3D-Modellierung

Details

The mounting of a leap motion to a head mounted display lets the user experience is own hands in a virtual environment. The tracking of the hand is very accurate, but there are always calibration mismatches between the users head position and the representation of his virtual hands. For example, if the users stands straight and is looking straight ahead onto the tracked, virtual hand in front of him. Then the real hand might be shifted slightly to the left or to the right. This error gets even bigger when the user keeps the hand in front of him and moves his head from left to right. This gets a problem, when the user wants to touch a virtual object, that has a real world representation. Then the users sees his hand touching the virtual object, but because of the shift he might miss to touch the real object. This work will focus on the calibration of the Leap Motion coordinate system to the HMD coordinate system based on the input of the touch surface. The calibration procedure will be based on the work of prior work. Your task is to implement the calibration procedure in Unity 5.x and evaluate the resulting accuracy of the system in an user study.

Aufgaben:

• Literaturrecherche verwandter Arbeiten
• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes
• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity 5, HMD, Multi-Touch Tisch, Leap Motion)
• Versuchsdesign, Durchführung und Auswertung einer Probandenstudie zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfrage

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik
• Interesse an selbstständigem wissenschaftlichem Arbeiten
• Erfahrung in Planung, Durchführung und statistischer Auswertung von Probandenstudien
• Grundlage in Unity (C#) und 3D-Modellierung

Details

Description

The design and evaluation of digital learning tools for preschoolers have unique requirements. For example, young children’s cognitive development dictates what they are capable of understanding and how they can interact with technologies. When designing for learning, learner’s goals, needs, activities and educational contexts must be additionally considered. Finally, when evaluating technologies with preschoolers, it must be noted that children can be shy, vary in their talkativeness, be biased in their responses to adults (wanting to please), have limited concentration, or have difficulty expressing themselves, all of which can influence usability testing outcomes.

This project aims to iteratively design and implement a digital learning tool for four- to six-year old children. The content of the tool will be based on the Control of Variables Strategy (CVS), which is foundational for school science and scientific literacy, but it does not routinely develop without practice or instruction. CVS is a strategy used to determine the effect of a particular variable; to manipulate that variable, but keep everything else the same (vary one thing at a time; VOTAT). As a result, one can distinguish between confounded and unconfounded experiments and draw valid inferences from experiments.

The project is a collaboration between the REASON Doctoral program at the Department of Psychology (LMU) and the Media Informatics Group (LMU). Usability testing of the tool will be conducted with children at local kindergartens.

Tasks

• Comprehensive survey of related work on interaction design for young children and existing products.
• Additional brief overview of cognitive development and scientific reasoning (specifically control of variables strategy).
• Design an interactive learning tool for preschool age children (4-6 years old) similar in concept to TED Tutor (see suggested readings below).
• Implement an Android/iOS/web app to run the learning tool on a tablet.
• Conduct (iterative) usability testing of the tool with children at kindergartens to refine design and implementation.
• Analyze the data collected from the studies and build valid conclusions.

Requirements

• Interest in an interdisciplinary study with a strong emphasis on technologies for learning sciences.
• Solid programming skills in a language/toolkit suitable for the implementation of a mobile app optimized to run on a tablet.
• Interest in designing a user interface for young children and refining it through usability testing.

Suggested Reading:

• Chen, Z., & Klahr, D. (1999). All other things being equal: acquisition and transfer of the control of variables strategy. Child Development, 70(5), 1098–1120.
• Gelderblom, H., & Kotze, P. (2008, October). Designing Technology for Young Children: What we can Learn from Theories of Cognitive Development. In Proceedings of the 2008 annual research conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists on IT research in developing countries: riding the wave of technology (pp. 66-75). ACM.
• Klahr, D. TED Tutor - Training in Experimental Design. see http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~tedtutor/index.html

Details

Problem Statement

A stylus allows designers and artists to provide artistic digital designs. Modern tablets (Surface Pro, IPad) support a stylus, allowing users to design anywhere.

However, creating 3D models can be difficult on 2D displays. 3D modelling requires users to navigate a lot in 3D space - even for drawing simple 3D lines. This project investigates how this process can be more efficient. The idea of this project is to better merge the two processes of navigation and creation.

In this project, the goal is to explore new methods of 3D input in 2D design applications, by using both stylus and multitouch input of the user. The two main work-tasks will be 1) creating a basic drawing prototype with new interaction methods, and 2) to explore what kind of new interactions are possible.

Tasks

• Survey of related work
• Conceptual design of methods that allow users drawing of 3D sketches
• Design and implement a drawing application that integrates the methods
• Evaluation of the application in a user study
• Report of the project into the thesis

Preferred (but not necessary) qualification

• Knowledge in the area of human computer interaction
• Interest in design, drawing, and artistry
• Experience in programming of 2D/3D GUI (E.g., Java processing)

Details

Problem Statement

Companies such as Oculus, Apple, or Microsoft are working on AR devices that may become an integral part in the daily life of the future. How the user interface may look like is still an open question, it may involve novel methods of input. In this project, we explore the use of eyes for interaction with the digital augmented information. How can the eyes be utilised to interact with digital information that are laid over the real world?

In general eye based interaction has been long investigated in the field of human-computer interaction. The eyes are one of the fastest input modalities, and work in unity with the user’s hands. Future AR devices, through glasses, have a high potential to have eye-tracking integrated and it is therefore imaginable that the eyes play an integral part in the interaction with the augmented reality.

The project is exploratory, and strongly focuses on the interaction design and building of prototypes. It involves iterative prototyping from basic ideas to mature user interfaces with close feedback rounds with the team (e.g., 1 or 2 times per week). It is also possible to get hands-on support on the implementation from team members. Ideas can be generated quickly with the team, and evaluated quickly with small prototypes. The goal is to create the most dynamic, fastest, and world-class user interface for AR. Inspirations can come from various media, e.g. Minority Report, IronMan, or Ready Player One.

Tasks

• Comprehensive survey of related work
• Setup of an AR device with integrated eye tracker (e.g., Hololens)
• Iterative development of the interaction concepts (with the team) and software prototypes (Unity c-sharp)
• Evaluation of final prototypes
• Analysis and report of study design

Preferred qualifications

• Interest UI design and Unity programming
• Scientific work and UI research
• Interest in novel input modalities and devices

Suggested reading

• Ken Pfeuffer, Jason Alexander, Ming Ki Chong, Yanxia Zhang, and Hans Gellersen. 2015. Gaze-Shifting: Direct-Indirect Input with Pen and Touch Modulated by Gaze. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology (UIST '15) https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2807442.2807460
• Ken Pfeuffer, Benedikt Mayer, Diako Mardanbegi, and Hans Gellersen. 2017. Gaze + pinch interaction in virtual reality. In Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (SUI '17) https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3131277.3132180
• Mikko Kytö, Barrett Ens, Thammathip Piumsomboon, Gun A. Lee, and Mark Billinghurst. 2018. Pinpointing: Precise Head- and Eye-Based Target Selection for Augmented Reality. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18) https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3173655

Details

Generative music systems are becoming more and more relevant nowadays. In the near future Artificial Intelligences will become evenly equal partners in music making scenarios. Therefore we have to find ways to interact with systems that are able to make their own decisions and have their own creative mind. Established communication with human musicians are eye-contact, gestures, verbal expressions.How can we communicate with digital musicians, how can they communicate with humans?

Tasks:

• Development of interaction concepts for the handling of AI/generative systems in a musical context.
• Implementation of a functional prototype that demonstrates the basic concept.
• Conducting a study with students.

Requirements:

• Interest and experience in music theory.
• Experience in programming and hardware-prototyping.
• Ambition to delve into hardware and software.

Suggested Reading:

• Yamaha Artificial Intelligence (AI) Transforms a Dancer into a Pianist
• Mateas, M. (2001). Expressive AI: A hybrid art and science practice. Leonardo, 34(2), 147-153.
• De Mantaras, R. L., & Arcos, J. L. (2002). AI and music: From composition to expressive performance. AI magazine, 23(3), 43.
• Francois, A. R., Chew, E., & Thurmond, D. (2007, June). Visual feedback in performer-machine interaction for musical improvisation. In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on New interfaces for musical expression (pp. 277-280). ACM.

Details

Collaboration is an essential part in music making. During collaboration soft skills as well as understanding for musical synergies are trained. Therefore we want to develop interfaces enable children to collaborate in music making. To motivate children in music making we have to develop concepts incorporating playful ideas, easy tasks and expressive outcomes. These aspects are important factors in a successful user experience. 

Tasks:

• UX research with children.
• Concept development and prototype implementation.
• Evaluation with children.

Requirements:

• Social skills and experience in handling kids.
• Experience in programming and prototyping (tools of your choice).
• Interest for and understanding of music theory.

Suggested Reading:

• Blaine, T., & Fels, S. (2003, May). Contexts of collaborative musical experiences. In Proceedings of the 2003 conference on New interfaces for musical expression (pp. 129-134). National University of Singapore.

Details

In the last years the trend to hardware use in music production continued. More and more users are deciding to choose hardware synthesizers, effects, etc. to enhance their production workflow. A growing group of electronic musicians even focusses on music performance without using computers. What are reasons for those tendencies? What are limiting factors of both approaches? How can we design interfaces to satisfy passionated hardware users as well as dedicated software enthusiasts? 

Tasks:

• UX research with music software user groups.
• UX research with hardware oriented musicians.
• Concept development based on the revealed insights.
• Prototyping the developed concept.

Requirements:

• Experience in UX research methods.
• Background in electronic music production and music theory.
• Ambition in realizing conceptual ideas.

Suggested Reading:

• Lazar, J., Feng, J. H., & Hochheiser, H. (2017). Research methods in human-computer interaction. Morgan Kaufmann.
• Russ, J. (2014). Longterm UX für Musikinstrumente-Research mit Nutzern von Kreativsoftware und Hardware am Beispiel von Ableton Live und Push. UP14-Vorträge.

Details

In a composite business environment, various people collect all sorts of qualitative feedback from customers as well as users in an unstructured way (e.g. product managers, technical presales, sales). The collected feedback differs from insights gathered through quantitative methods, as it is rich of valuable and personal needs, struggles and other stories.

We need you to design, (partly) implement, and test your ideas for the collaborative analysis of qualitative data, the sharing of higher-level insights and creation of larger user stories. Concepts such as ‘playful tagging’ could be used to encourage platform users to help structure the data.

Your work consists in…

• Conducting a survey of related work in areas such as collaborative qualitative analysis and UX tools
• Analyzing the problem, creating concepts for solutions, prototyping, testing your ideas
• Implementing your ideas into an existing nodeJS-, ReactJS-, mongoDB-based prototype
• Analyzing real qualitative data

You need…

• Basic knowledge of Javascript as you need to work with nodeJS-, ReactJS-, mongoDB
• Basic knowledge of prototyping tools (e.g. Axure, Adobe Experience) to express your ideas and concepts
• (Optional) experience in evaluating qualitative data

About us

You will be joining the UX team of the Fujitsu Enabling Software Technology GmbH under the responsibility of Dr. Sarah Tausch and Dr. Julie Wagner. Both have worked at the Media Informatics and Human-Computer Interaction Groups of the Department of Informatics of the University of Munich: Dr. Sarah Tausch is a former doctoral student of Prof. Heinrich Hussmann and achieved her PhD in 2016. Dr. Julie Wagner is a former PostDoc at the group of Prof. Andreas Butz. Both collaborated on qualitative analysis topics during their time at LMU. Today, they are both passionate UX researchers at Fujitsu. They understand the balancing act of writing a thesis split between university and industry and will guide you to a thesis with both research value and gain for the industry.

Details

Details

Description

Personalization is one of the biggest trends at the moment since it allows systems to target their users personally. Currently, personalization in HCI is often based on past user behavior, preferences, and interaction context. Personality traits, a concept of Psychology, could provide a promising additional source of information for personalization, which goes beyond context- and device-specific behavior and preferences. For example, Netflix users could get recommendations based on their personality or health app could provide information and decision support strategies based on personality.

However, which mental model do users have regarding the concept of personality? Are there universal negative and positive personality traits? What do users expect of personality-aware personalization and adaptation based on personality? Do users accept personality-aware adaptation?

It's possible that several students work on Bachelor's or Master's theses answering one of the questions mentioned above each.

Tasks

• Literature research regarding personality traits and personalization
• Develop a concept to answer one of the research questions mentioned above
• Implement the concept
• Evaluate the concept with an empirical HCI method

Minimum requirements

• Interested in personalization and psychological topics
• Previous experience in conducting user studies

Details

Description

Developing an Android app for predicting personality traits via smartphone usage

In the PhoneStudy project, an interdisciplinary team consisting of psychologists, statisticians, and computer scientists develop an Android app, which tracks and logs the user’s smartphone behaviour to predict personality traits. For example, we track the number of users’ calls, sms, and app usage, which might predict how extraverted the user is. The app will be distributed among participants in spring 2018, which will then use the app for several months. There are several tasks for media informatics students in this project (cf. below), from which you can choose. Please contact me when you are interested in the project and will give you more details.

Tasks

You can choose between different tasks:

• Configuring and working on the server, its scalability and stability, as well as the data base (MariaDB)
• Working on the internal web based front end of the server, which depicts the current status of participants and logged data
• Further develop the app: integrating new features and fixing current bug
• Quality management: Developing automatic testing scripts

Minimum requirements

• Interested in interdisciplinary projects
• High communication skills, especially willing to communicate interdisciplinary
• Able to work independently
• Previous experience with server configuration, (Android) app development, web development, data bases (depending on the chosen task)
• High frustration tolerance

Details

Grundidee des Forschungsprojektes Providentia (www.testfeld-a9.de) ist es, hochautomatisierten Fahrzeugen einen möglichst umfassenden Vorausblick über die fahrzeugeigene Sensorik hinaus zu ermöglichen. Dafür wird aus dem komplexen Abbild der Umwelt mit Hilfe von Sensorik an der Fahrbahn (z.B. Kameras, Radar) und mit Sensorik in vernetzten Fahrzeugen (z.B. Kameras, Lidar) ein „digitaler Zwilling“ des Verkehrsgeschehens in Echtzeit erzeugt. Dieser wird maschinenlesbar über ein verbindendes 5G-Mobilfunknetz zur Verfügung gestellt und ermöglicht es hochautomatisierten Fahrzeugen Entscheidungen auf Basis umfassender Informationen zu fällen. Verdeckungen von Verkehrsteilnehmern werden aufgelöst, Messunsicherheiten verringert und ein kilometerweiter Vorausblick des Verkehrsgeschehens zur Verfügung gestellt. Damit ist die Grundlage für ein sicheres, vollautonomes und ökonomisch sinnvolles Fahrzeugverhalten gegeben. So liefern wir einen wesentlichen Beitrag für die Steuerung hochautomatisierter Fahrzeuge, für die Verbesserung des Verkehrsflusses und der Verkehrssicherheit.

Aufgaben:

• Eigenständiges Arbeiten an einem interessanten Forschungsprojekt
• Anpassung und Implementation der Simulationsumgebung in Carmaker
• Weiterentwicklung des Algorithmus zur Visualisierung der Echtzeitdaten in Camaker

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik
• Interesse an selbständigem wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten
• Gute Programmierkenntnisse in C++
• Idealerweise Kenntnisse in ROS und Linux

Details

Grundidee des Forschungsprojektes Providentia (www.testfeld-a9.de) ist es, hochautomatisierten Fahrzeugen einen möglichst umfassenden Vorausblick über die fahrzeugeigene Sensorik hinaus zu ermöglichen. Dafür wird aus dem komplexen Abbild der Umwelt mit Hilfe von Sensorik an der Fahrbahn (z.B. Kameras, Radar) und mit Sensorik in vernetzten Fahrzeugen (z.B. Kameras, Lidar) ein „digitaler Zwilling“ des Verkehrsgeschehens in Echtzeit erzeugt. Dieser wird maschinenlesbar über ein verbindendes 5G-Mobilfunknetz zur Verfügung gestellt und ermöglicht es hochautomatisierten Fahrzeugen Entscheidungen auf Basis umfassender Informationen zu fällen. Verdeckungen von Verkehrsteilnehmern werden aufgelöst, Messunsicherheiten verringert und ein kilometerweiter Vorausblick des Verkehrsgeschehens zur Verfügung gestellt. Damit ist die Grundlage für ein sicheres, vollautonomes und ökonomisch sinnvolles Fahrzeugverhalten gegeben. So liefern wir einen wesentlichen Beitrag für die Steuerung hochautomatisierter Fahrzeuge, für die Verbesserung des Verkehrsflusses und der Verkehrssicherheit.

Aufgaben:

• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity)
• Aufbau der Simulationsumgebung des digitalen Abbilds der Autobahn in Unity

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik oder ähnliches
• Interesse an selbständigem wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten
• Gute Kenntnisse in Unity

Details

Interfaces connected to drones have to potential to provide a highly mobile and temporal utilisation at unexpected places in urban prime locations. Further, several senses of the human body are not taken into account in current HCI development apart form touch, sound and sight.With olfactory interfaces connected to drones we aim to establish temporary "smell corridors" that could be of assistance of people living in a city/urban context: Accidents could, for example, be covered in a temporary "smell corridor" to warn pedestrians or cyclists of the nearby danger. In particular, olfactory drone interfaces could be used as guidance systems for blind people.In this thesis we want therefore to investigate possible attributes of a "olfactory drone interface" such as:
Tasks:

• investigate suitable hardware technology (olfactory distributor)
• find suitable smell types for an urban context (warning vs. safety)
• observe recognisability of different odors
• report on ideal distribution height/distance
• experiment with encoding of information through smell types / intensity / distribution

Required Skills:

• Experience with quick hardware prototyping (Sketching in Hardware)
• High Interest (or gained already first practical experiences) in 3D Printing/Laser Cutting and/or drones
• Interest in creative & innovative interface design

Details